We Want What We Want
Page 22
“Give it time,” he said, echoing my friends, and let me go.
* * *
—
I did. I gave it two months and during that period started working in charcoal—still small-scale, but more confident, I thought. I drew aggressive, angular shadows that skulked, partial but huge, across the page: a dome that you might not realize, until you looked at it for a while, was a soldier’s helmet. The rain of smart bombs on a fractured city. A mother’s arm extended across her child’s body in useless protection.
Every once in a while, as we cleaned up at the end of a shift, Dmitri would ask me how it was going, and I’d linger for a while, telling him. He knew enough about drawing to ask good questions but not so much that it was intimidating to answer. Sometimes a couple of other waiters would be around, sometimes not. Dmitri would open a bottle of wine and we’d drink it; afterward, I’d walk across town at three a.m. kind of buzzed, smoking a cigarette, feeling armor-plated.
On a Saturday night in June we stayed at the restaurant talking until late. It was the longest day of the year and all evening I’d felt buoyed by the light, carried along by it. I stood chattering to Dmitri about something—I don’t remember what—as he closed up the restaurant. He was crouching down to lock the grate, smiling up at me, a particular smile he sometimes gave me that meant I was being a little foolish and also funny. Some movement or sound alerted me and I turned and saw Robert. He was standing in the street, gazing at us, not moving. He was wearing a brown suede jacket I’d never seen before, too warm for the weather and too big for him, and he looked pale and wan.
“I didn’t know you two were together,” he said.
Dmitri stood beside me and snaked his arm around my waist, and I realized only then it was true: we were together. Robert’s eyes were so forlorn that I almost forgot he was the one who’d stopped seeing me. But Dmitri was steering me gently away, and I allowed myself to be led. I wasn’t angry at Robert, or in love with him anymore. He seemed very sad to me, and very lost. I held Dmitri’s hand and I thought, with a pang of guilt and excitement, We are the lucky ones.
* * *
—
I left my little apartment and moved in with Dmitri in the West Village. For a while I kept working at the restaurant, but Dmitri urged me to quit. “I’m not trying to make you a kept woman,” he said. “I’m just saying you can afford to take some time to focus on your art, if you want it. Two months. Six months. If you want.”
I resisted and resisted and finally gave in. The deal was too good to pass up. And it was an offer extended without conditions or manipulations. Dmitri wasn’t using me to fulfill his own lost artistic inclinations—he was perfectly happy in business; it suited him—and he didn’t want to control me. He was just offering because he could. So I grabbed the chance. I shared a studio in Red Hook with a couple other artists and if I stayed there late, drinking beers with them, he didn’t mind. Other evenings we hung out with his friends, who ran nightclubs and limousine services and wore linen suits and fancy watches. They were as foreign to me as I was to them and we found each other entertaining, dipping in and out of each other’s worlds like tourists for a night.
After six months I felt like I’d made some progress, but not enough, and I applied to grad school. I took out loans and Dmitri helped me with the rent. He said it wasn’t a big deal—“I’d be paying the rent on this place with or without you”—and I believed him. Things were always easy with him. After I graduated, I put together the ingredients of a career in art: nothing spectacular, but enough for me to feel that it was real. Group gallery shows, the occasional solo one in New Haven or Boston. Small grants. Adjunct teaching in different schools in the city. I paid rent and helped Dmitri out with hostessing when he needed it—he opened another restaurant uptown, then one in Brooklyn, not far from his parents’ place, in a neighborhood that had once been unfashionable and was now getting discovered. He came to all my shows. On the night of my thirty-first birthday, we had dinner at home—Dmitri never enjoyed going out to dinner at other restaurants; he couldn’t stop comparing and critiquing—and I took a tiny sip of wine and told him I was pregnant.
“Wait, what?” he said. He tried to pretend he was shocked but a smile was already overtaking his mouth. We hadn’t been trying but we’d been sloppy, both of us knowing what was happening without discussing it. He put his elbow on the table and covered his mouth with his hands, his broad white smile showing through the gaps in his fingers. We gave up on eating and went to bed, and when I woke up in the morning he was smiling in his sleep.
* * *
—
Over the objections of his family, we did not get married. I wasn’t opposed to it so much as I simply didn’t see the point. Putting on a fancy white dress, walking down the aisle of a church I didn’t belong to—it felt like something a stranger might do. It was like Sasha buying the condo; a choice that felt too regular for the kind of life I had. So we just focused on getting ready for the baby. I took vitamins and had doctor’s appointments. Dmitri’s mother began showing up at the apartment bearing gifts of food and advice. We looked at other apartments, bigger places with room for a nursery. I was five months along when I woke up in the middle of the night with a stabbing pain in my abdomen. In the bathroom, I saw my underwear bright with blood. I closed my eyes, wanting to unsee it. Dmitri found me sitting on the toilet, eyes closed, my forehead slick with sweat.
“It’s over,” I said. I already knew, as if I’d dreamed it in advance, what the next few hours would contain: the trip to the hospital, the ultrasound, the drugs that made me contract, the tiny white dead baby they put in my arms for a few minutes before they took her away. And then I was home again, at the apartment. They gave me a card with the baby’s footprints on it. We didn’t give her a name.
* * *
—
I think I had been too lucky in my life. I didn’t have enough practice with grief. Or maybe I was simply wired wrong for this particular experience, which proved to be my undoing. It unknit me like a thread loose from a sweater. Six months later, everyone had said how sorry they were—our friends and family had said it, Dmitri and I had said it to each other—but I could not stop grieving. I couldn’t explain why. My sorrow took strange and specific form. I carried the card with the footprints around with me, in my bag, and touched it before and after I did anything—when I woke up and went to sleep, when I went to the bank, when I got on or off the subway. I stopped being able to ride in cabs, because I kept imagining that we were going to run over a baby. I would hear the crunch of a stroller or bassinet beneath the tires. The whimper of infant flesh giving way. After a while I couldn’t ride the subway either, always seeing a baby crushed beneath the train, electrified on the third rail. I had to walk everywhere, and if it was too far to walk, I stayed home.
Dmitri was very patient. He encouraged me to take time off—“Give it time,” he said, just as he had before—and then, after a while, to go back to work. Ever the obedient one, I listened to him. I went to the studio, and did some teaching, and I chose not to admit to him or anyone else how little engaged I was by any of it. I papered over the hole in myself but it was still hollow beneath. He could tell, of course, and he did his best to comfort me. He wanted to try again; he still felt optimistic about the future. It was easier for him. I understood this, but I couldn’t forgive it. The straightforwardness of his recovery from loss felt like a betrayal.
A year went by in which we didn’t have sex. We went out with friends, we went to couples counseling, we went to work, and we came home to an apartment that was increasingly divided into his space and mine. At last he did a final, generous thing: he paid the rent for six months in advance and then moved out, letting me have the place. I was relieved to see him go.
* * *
—
I didn’t leave New York. My history with the place stabilized me, the sense of my own past extendi
ng across neighborhoods and years. I stayed, and one day I stood on the platform of the C train at West Fourth, steadying my breath, and I felt something unlatch inside me, like a door opening into a hallway. I knew I was letting go not just of the baby, but of that phantom life all three of us were going to live together. And now, no longer. I got on the train; I kept teaching; I began working in collages, layers of images that I slapped with paste and then liquid paper and then drew on top of so that only I knew what lay beneath. I found comfort in this burial, the secrecy of the hidden pictures, the delicate bulk of paper laid on top of paper. Dmitri, I heard, moved to Brooklyn, married a Greek girl he met through his mother, and had twins. Eventually I started dating a sculptor named Luca I met at CUNY, where I was teaching drawing three days a week. Luca was older, with a twenty-year-old son back in Rome. He’d come to New York several years before under vague circumstances—I assumed there was a woman involved—and fallen in love with it.
“I am anonymous here,” he told me. We were talking in the hallway; his office was next to mine.
“Were you a movie star in Rome?” I said, teasing him.
He frowned. He was in his fifties, and losing his hair, but he dressed well and had bright green eyes. “Of course I was,” he said. “Did you not see me in Life Is Beautiful?”
We didn’t move in together. We were happy with a simpler arrangement: dinner a few nights a week, sometimes a film, the comfort of an arm slung over yours late at night. So I was surprised when, at the end of the semester, he invited me to go to Italy with him. Immediately he saw my doubt, and tried to allay it.
“You have never been to Italy,” he said. “You will enjoy it. And me, I will have a companion, and this is fun for me.”
I understood, then: his return to Italy would be triumphant with a younger woman on his arm. Both of us would benefit, another simple arrangement. So I went with him, and he took me by the arm through churches and museums, whispering to me about what we saw, like the teacher he was. I met his son and the rest of his family. We had dinner and drinks with his friends, artists and journalists and academics, and the talk was once again of a war in the Middle East and a president that I did not support, though I felt less confident in my judgments than I had when I was younger. I was more aware of everything I didn’t know; this much, at least, had come to me with age.
We were at a cocktail reception at a gallery when I wandered around a corner in search of a restroom and saw a small gold painting by itself on a wall. I recognized it right away, just as you recognize a friend who has aged yet remains eternally, doggedly, the same. Back at the gallery desk, I located an information sheet on the artist and saw I was correct. Robert Jorgensen, American, 1968–. The painting was untitled, and there were two others like it in the gallery. He lived in California now, the biography said. He’d moved from large works to small ones and the found objects—the grocery store flyers and magazine pages that Sasha had decried as imitation Rauschenberg—had disappeared. In their place was simply paint, loosely laid, like a sloppily iced cake. It seemed to be layered and also glazed, as pottery is glazed, so that it shone with metallic sparkle, green-gold, blue-gold. Instead of repetitive circles or letters there were pinpricks: tiny holes marring the paint that you almost felt you could see into. Gazing at them, I felt that he’d found a way to harness the electricity in his brain. They were pictures of being struck by lightning, arrested in a moment that was painful and porous and gilded. And they were beautiful—beauty pricked with hurt.
I looked around the gallery. On the other side of the room Luca, talking to friends, caught my eye, making sure I was all right. I nodded. The person I was really looking for, of course, was Dmitri—because who else would share my memory, who else would understand? If he’d been in the room I would have rushed into his arms and begged him to forgive me for having driven him away. But he wasn’t. I had to keep to myself the strangeness of seeing those paintings, so thick and dense with luster, reminding me how little and how much can last.
Acknowledgments
Short stories are my first and greatest love as a writer and I’m forever grateful to everyone who reads, writes, and publishes them. My thanks to all the editors of the magazines in which these stories originally appeared, especially Deborah Treisman, Adam Ross, Evelyn Somers, Meakin Armstrong, and Ladette Randolph. Boundless thanks as well to Jenny Jackson and Maris Dyer at Knopf; Janie Yoon and Sarah MacLachlan at House of Anansi; and my agent, Amy Williams. I’m lucky, this year more than any other, to have the support of my friends and family, near and far.
“The Universal Particular” is an homage that owes a debt to “Hester Lilly” by the English writer Elizabeth Taylor. “Service Intelligence” was loosely inspired, in ways probably recognizable only to me, by the story “Sleet” by Stig Dagerman. The epigraph to this book is from “Dead Doe” by the poet Brigit Pegeen Kelly, gone too soon.
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Alix Ohlin is the author of six books, including the novel Dual Citizens, which was shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Best American Short Stories, and many other places. She lives in Vancouver, where she is the director of the UBC School of Creative Writing.
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